“The Multipolar World: A Pact for the Future”

The pantomime, which in years passed would have preceded Western imperial intervention, was not required. This time, there was no rush to the UN. No vote in Congress. No attempt to assemble a coalition of the willing. Only a series of strikes with such potentially catastrophic consequences that some countries’ war doctrines would treat them as cause for nuclear retaliation.

Quick to fall in line, the E3 – Britain, France and Germany – acted in unison to support Washington’s assault on Iranian sovereignty. “Iran must return to the negotiating table,” they urged with a Kafkaesque incoherence – ignoring the fact that not only was Iran at the negotiating table when Israel launched its war of aggression, but that countless negotiators around that very table had been intentionally targeted.

In rushing to defend the Israeli state, European and American leaders portrayed the settler-colony as critical to the defence of ‘liberal civilisation’. In so doing, they once again endorsed the genocidal actions of a state which refuses to officially disclose the existence of its 90 nuclear warheads, never mind sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

In other words, they confessed that the defence of Western interests depends on the barbarism of a rogue state and its efforts to ignite wider conflagration in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and now Iran. The remnants of the international order shredded in Gaza, European and North American governments can now say the quiet part out loud. 

“Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us,” said the German Chancellor last week. His words were no slip of the tongue. 

The ' forever war’ was not simply a moment in time; it was – and remains – a model of 21st-century capitalist development that wrecks carnage, depletes resources and denies sovereignty across the South in order to fuel economies in the North.  

This model – which allows a state to wipe more than 180,000 people from the face of the earth, yet simultaneously receive 943 separate arms shipments from the ‘leader of the free world’ – depends on a pre-existing colonial dehumanisation that views some lives as simply disposable. Indeed, this assumption was critical to the operation of the postwar order. 

Take the example of US-imposed economic sanctions, to which roughly one-third of the globe is subject. For President Woodrow Wilson, sanctions were a weapon “more tremendous than war”, such was the suffering they could inflict on civilian populations. Similarly, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger used to advocate waging war in the “grey areas”, where no one was looking, as a means of asserting the hegemony of the US empire. The people of Laos, Cambodia, East Timor and Bangladesh continue to live with the consequences, be that in the form of unexploded ordinance or disappeared family members. 

Today, there are no “grey areas”. To anyone with a social media account, it is clear that international law is applied selectively depending on your relationship to imperialism. And the ruling class knows it. “They [the Global South] won’t ever listen to us again,” said one senior G7 diplomat as Israel’s genocide began in October 2023.

My point is not to dwell on the events of the last 72 hours but to illustrate that, as the multipolar world emerges, the comparative global influence of the West wanes and the United States clings to what remains of its hegemony, there is no rulebook that will shield the world’s workers from the F-35 or the B-2. 

The United Nations, said its second Secretary-General in 1954, “was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.” Seven decades later, his successor António Guterres pinpointed “hell on earth” on a map: The Gaza Strip. 

In so doing, he unwillingly illustrated the collapse of the post-war international system. The actions of the Trump administration on Saturday evening, then, to escalate a brewing regional war cannot be separated from the broader questions before us today. 

Friends, we live amidst the transition to a new world, a multipolar world. This transition, however, continues to be characterised by the contradiction between imperialism and the world’s oppressed. Unequal exchange, for example, persists. Indeed, 826 billion hours of Southern labour (more than the annual work of all US and EU workers combined) continues to be siphoned from the South to the North. In this sense, the struggle for the new world is a truly systemic conflict, where a vision of cooperation and mutual respect confronts domination. 

In Europe, and across the West, the drive to war distracts from the crisis of decline which grips all of our societies. 

Having accounted for more than 50% of global GDP in 1980, the G7 countries – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the USA –  today make up just 30%. 

Our economies aren’t growing. Our productivity has collapsed. Our quality of employment has plummeted with the explosion of the service sector. Today, the only industrial strategy our elites can offer is the manufacture of bombs and bullets.

Unable to correct this faltering trajectory or halt the development of an alternative global order, our ruling classes resort to repression. Palestine Action will be proscribed in Britain.  Palestine conferences are shut down in Germany. Journalists in the US are shot at with rubber bullets while broadcasting live on TV, as the violence imperialism exports around the world returns to the core. 

This crisis of international order, however, creates an unprecedented opportunity for its reconstruction. With the recent inclusion of six new member states, BRICS now represents 45% of humanity and 40% of global GDP.  

The bloc’s momentum is undeniable. The result: The G7 can no longer claim the mantle of the world’s executive body. 

The old world, as we saw last week, will not go quietly. In resisting its inevitable demise, imperialism will not think twice about throwing the world’s workers before the fire of machine guns. 

For those of us in Europe, confronting this drive to war – which we must understand as an explicit reaction to the promise of an alternative order – remains our most urgent task. Because, as Karl Liebknecht identified a century ago, our main enemy is always at home.